Minimise the amount of time spent on apostrophe worksheets and spelling posters and start maximising your pupils’ potential.

Leading on literacy can be a thoroughly thankless task. It can often feel like you’re working incredibly hard to produce resources and strategies which colleagues at best ignore and at worst resent. The problem is often that we’re expending effort in the wrong place and trying to persuade teachers to do the wrong things. Frustratingly, there’s very little guidance about how best to spend your precious time and it can be hard to find clear information on what approaches are likely to be most successful.

Our advice is to minimise the amount of time spent on apostrophe worksheets and spelling posters. It’s not that these things are unhelpful, rather that they often attempt to solve a problem that’s much more deeply rooted.

The vast majority of literacy difficulties trace their roots back to problems with reading.

About your instructor, David Didau

In 2011, frustrated by the current state of education I began to blog. Since then I have expressed the constraints and irritations of ordinary teachers, detailed the successes and failures of my classroom and synthesised my 15 years of teaching experienced through the lens of education research and cognitive psychology.

I’ve also spent a lot of time working in schools to improve the way teachers approach students’ literacy. In my book The Secret of Literacy, I urged teachers to ‘make the implicit explicit’. Teachers are highly literate but often have little idea how they are able to do what they do. Often teachers just assume students can do what they can do. Breaking down and codifying what teachers are able to do, allows them to teach reading and writing more effectively.

Pricing